Tag Archives: BMI

Country singer/songwriter Kip Moore and country songwriter Dan Couch celebrated their first No. 1 song — the two-week chart-topper “Somethin’ ’Bout a Truck” — with a rooftop party at BMI last week.

“This is what you set out to do as a songwriter, to hopefully get the chance to write hits,” Moore said before the party. “We love to write, but you get so used to it not happening that when it finally does, it’s a hard thing to wrap your head around. To be in this place is life-changing for sure.”

After the party kicked off, Moore and Couch got on stage to say their thank yous and got choked up while telling the crowd about their journey.

“I feel really really lucky to be able to do this today,” Couch said. “My wife always believed we could be here today. When we moved here I asked my wife for five years. She gave me two five-year extensions and then some.”

Moore got teary-eyed while acknowledging his father who passed away last year.

“I want to thank my dad for telling me to stick with it,” he said. “I know he’s up there watching... Maybe the next time I can cruise through this, but I think this is the first time it’s hit me.”

Visitors gather at the Frances Williams Preston visitation at the Country Music Hall of Fame. (Jae S. Lee/The Tennessean)

By Bobby AllynThe Tennessean

Hundreds of admirers poured into the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum on Sunday evening to pay tribute to Frances Preston, the celebrated music executive whose work at performing rights group BMI supported and enlarged songwriters in Nashville and around the country.

During the visitation for Preston, music professionals of all stripes streamed through the hall of fame’s rotunda to celebrate the woman who died last week at 83 of congestive heart failure.

Mrs. Preston climbed the ranks of the music business during her career from radio station receptionist to BMI’s chief executive after she founded the group’s Nashville office, which helped make Music Row the heart of country music’s recording and publishing scene.

Click to see a gallery of Frances Preston over the years (photo: Jae S. Lee/The Tennessean(

By Peter Cooper and Anita WadhwaniThe Tennessean

Frances Williams Preston, the Nashville native who began her professional career as a mail messenger and became one of the most successful and consequential executives in the history of the music industry, died Wednesday morning at age 83 from congestive heart failure.

Mrs. Preston was much to many, a maverick whose work makes her an architect of modern day Nashville.

“Frances was awe-inspiring,” said acclaimed singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash. “I looked up to her so much — she was a charming, powerful woman in an entrenched boys club. She rose to the top, and gathered admirers as she advanced, rather than enemies. She had a lot of grace, a keen eye for business and a true love of music.”

Mrs. Preston was a transformational figure who led performance rights organization BMI and established BMI’s Nashville office in 1958. She was the first female executive on Nashville’s Music Row and the first female corporate executive in Tennessee.

Mrs. Preston was integral in building Nashville’s reputation as a music center, in raising millions of charity dollars (enabling the creation of the Frances Williams Preston Research Laboratories at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center) and in helping to establish the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

Gregg Allman signs copies of his new book at BMI in Nashville on May 10 (photo: Danny Clinch)

Gregg Allman didn’t set out to write a book when he unwittingly began work on his new memoir. In fact, it all started with a process much more familiar to the Nashville native and Southern rock veteran – a recording session, of sorts.

In 1981, he started having weekly, tape-recorded conversations with a member of the Allman Brothers Band’s road crew, recounting moments in his life and career.

“He would come over and say, ‘Tell me about this…’ and that would get me going,” Allman recalls. “He’d light the spark and I’d make the fire. So we did that for about three months, maybe longer. I wound up having a duffel bag full of 90-minute cassettes.”

Thirty years later, at the urging of his manager and with the help of author Alan Light, Allman has turned those tapes into My Cross to Bear, which hit shelves earlier this month.

Nashville native and southern rock vet Gregg Allman has postponed an upcoming book tour to undergo cardiac testing -but a stop at BMI's Nashville headquarters is still scheduled for May 10.

Allman will undergo testing Friday at the Mayo Clinic campus in Jacksonville, Florida to see if he needs additional care following a recent hernia operation. As a result, he's delayed the publicity tour for his new memoir, My Cross to Bear,

I've been working on the book for years and am grateful for all the support I've received in putting it together," Allman said in a release. "As soon as doctors give me the thumbs up to go back on the road, I will be heading out onto my book tour and I can’t wait to meet all of my fans."

The press release states that if all goes according to plan, Allman will only have to delay his tour for one week, and will kick off on May 8.

BMI and a slew of gospel music stars honored gospel greats Kirk Franklin and Hezekiah Walker at the 13th annual Trailblazers of Gospel Music Awards Luncheon, held at Rocketown in Nashville on Fri., January 13.

The performing rights organization also named Marvin Sapp's "The Best In Me" BMI’s Most-Performed Gospel Song of the Year. Sapp surprised the invitation-only audience at the luncheon with a performance of his award-winning song, joining a roster of additional performers that included Wess Morgan, William McDowell, Earnest Pugh and Vashawn Mitchell.

Gospel music stars and industry have assembled in Nashville this week for the 27th Annual Stellar Awards, which takes place at the Grand Ole Opry House on Jan. 14.

Click this photo to see a gallery from the 2011 BMI Country Awards red carpet. Here, Keith Urban is recognized during the 59th annual BMI Country Awards on Tuesday night. (Photo: Sam Simpkins/The Tennessean)

Akins and Davidson were named songwriters of the year, each contributing five of the performing rights organization’s most-performed songs of the year on radio and television, four of which they wrote together: “All About Tonight” (Blake Shelton), “All Over Me” (Josh Turner), “Gimmie That Girl” (Joe Nichols) and “The Shape I’m In” (Joe Nichols). “All Over Me” also earned the pair Song of the Year honors.

Akins and Davidson make up two-thirds of songwriting trio the Peach Pickers, and the group’s other member, Ben Hayslip, was named songwriter of the year at the ASCAP Country Awards on Sunday.

“We’re all from South Georgia, and we just talk the same language, and it lands on paper the same,” Davidson said. “To be honored amongst these people is very special to me, and I know it is to Rhett.”

Braddock, a new inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame and the only living songwriter to have written chart-toppers in five consecutive decades, was named a BMI songwriting Icon for his list of hits, including classics “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” and contemporary hits “People Are Crazy” and “I Wanna Talk About Me.”

Braddock, a recent inductee to the Country Music Hall of Fame, has written songs including “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” “I Wanna Talk About Me,” “People Are Crazy” and “Time Marches On.”

The songwriter also writes books. He’s working on his second memoir, Hollywood, Tennessee: A Life on Nashville’s Music Row, the follow-up to 2007’s Down in Orburndale: A Songwriter’s Youth in Old Florida.

In addition to honoring Braddock, the BMI Country Awards will also recognize its country songwriter, song and publisher of the year as well as salute the writers and publishers of the past year’s 50 most performed songs from BMI’s country catalog.